What international security lessons can be learned from the occupations of Germany and Japan following WWII?
I think the primary lesson is that occupations are much more successful when there is a security threat that necessitates their success. Our initial policy toward the defeated populations, particularly in Germany, and to a lesser extent in Japan, was quite coercive because U.S. policymakers were convinced that there would be postwar resistance. As part of my research on U.S. security policy in the early stages of these occupations, I found that American troops had orders that permitted some surprisingly harsh reprisals for resistance. U.S. forces, for example, could take hostages or level towns that resisted. There were plans for using air power to intimidate the population. In fact, lessons on how best to employ reprisals were drawn from Nazi counter-insurgency techniques. This early period of the occupation, in the months before and after the war’s end, is often overlooked because these policies were largely reversed when conditions in the defeated countries made it clear that postwa
